Can I use placement.info for an ad hoc zone?

My overall question is what is the best way to control the same content item type with one role being for admin edit and another for web user edit?

I have a content part that I want to show all associated parts for in the admin dashboard, but suppress a few of the parts when allowing a non admin web user to edit the content. Essentially, I'm trying to find out how to reuse the same driver and edit views
to handle the content for both roles.

I've managed to get the edit template to be displayed in both places, but I haven't had any success in being able to selectively filter the admin only parts out of the non admin view.

Now you're confusing me. You were talking about existing shapes, not your own? That sounds dangerous, as you don't necessarily know how the part you're hiding is going to react to lack of input when posted. I would rethink the scenario, but if you still
want to proceed, you could implement a shape table provider and check what you need from there, and suppress the shape.

Okay, I won't go down that road, then. So, it sounds like I'm back to my prior long hand approach where I'm defining a view model and transferring the values over on post back. Would that be a good approach?